Sports

Sports is more than the toy department of our culture, it's often the source of excellent documentary work. Case in point: "More Than a Game," which is destined to be known as "the LeBron James movie" but in truth is a whole lot more. It shows how the powerful bond that James formed with his teammates in high school and earlier sustained him and transformed everyone's lives. Also pay attention to a continuing series of involving documentaries, "30 for 30," sponsored by ESPN Films for the cable network and using big name directors.

The gig: Olympic medalist Anita L. DeFrantz, 61, is president and a director of the LA84 Foundation, the charitable organization that runs off an endowment of surplus funds from the Los Angeles Olympic Games. In the three decades since those games, LA84 has donated more than $214 million to more than 1,100 Southern California youth sports programs, providing opportunities for more than 3 million children. DeFrantz has spent nearly half her life with the organization, formerly known as the Amateur Athletic Foundation.

Re "For many women, sports are sideshow," July 10 As John McEnroe famously said, "You cannot be serious. " A study of 19 subjects concluded that women watch sports merely as a way to connect with their husbands? Oh, those poor passive dears with no control of the remote and nothing better to do. I'll have to run this by my friend Kim, with whom I owned season tickets to the Kings for seven years and who got up at the crack of dawn to watch the finals of Wimbledon. Or Mary, whose Sunday worship of the Packers rivals my own for the Patriots.

When American Legion Chaplain Bill Cook peered through the chain-link fence at the windswept landscape - a broken runway, scrubby fields and green foothills in the distance - he remembered the Phantoms. The fighter jets were once a regular sight, slicing through the air over what was for decades a bustling military base. "The jets would just roar," he said on a recent afternoon at the old U.S. Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. Now the Vietnam veteran is leading the charge to transform a small piece of that land into a final resting place for Orange County's veterans.

There has been a lot of discussion during the London Olympics about the inclusion of some, um, questionable sports in the Games. Some say they should be eliminated, some say no. Some say certain sports should be added, some say no. Some of The Times' Olympic crew took on the topic Wednesday morning during our daily live chat. What? You haven't been watching our daily live chats on Google hangout? We have them every Monday to Friday at 8 a.m. PDT. Adding and dropping sports wasn't the only topic at today's chat, but you can watch that part of it in the video above.

Jordan Resigns--Russ Jordan, 49, who has been athletic director at Long Beach City College for eight years, has resigned. He has asked for reassignment to the college's counseling department. Swimming Stars--Six Whittier High School senior swimmers, who lettered as freshmen, have gone through four seasons without losing a Whitmont League meet. They are Ramona Linderoth, Christie Borak, Laurie Hohne, Stacey Albanese, Stacey Munatones and Amy Hall.

If you've ever deluded yourself that betting on sports was really investing, have we got a hedge fund for you. Starting on Saturday, the new Centaur Galileo fund in London will be making investments not in the traditional financial playing fields of stocks, oil futures or real estate, but in the actual playing fields of soccer, tennis and horse racing. Galileo is probably the first hedge fund to make bets on sports events, experts say. "We put numbers against those things that you and me and everyone in pubs have casual discussions about," said Tony Woodhams, the managing director at Centaur Group, which operates the fund.

Regarding fan violence ("Snowballs in Hell," editorial, Dec. 28): It is just a reflection of the greedy athletes they came out to see. I grew up a N.Y. Giant fan, and as a kid even had season seats at Yankee Stadium. I paid $35 for the seven home games, the tickets were in the bleachers behind the end zone. But come blizzard, rainstorm or whatever nature threw at us, we went. Loyal Giant fans, not like today. Today's athletes no longer have the team spirit, the respect for tradition and most of all no respect for the people who made them what they have become, the new breed of fan. A player scores and rather than hand the ball to the referee, he has to do a 10-minute dance routine that the networks show.

"June 17, 1994" is Brett Morgen's tone-poem documentary about a day in the life of American sports and heroes of sport. It was the day that Arnold Palmer played his final, fraught round at a U.S. Open, the day the World Cup began in Chicago, that the New York Rangers got a ticker-tape parade for winning the Stanley Cup, that the Knicks and the Rockets played the fifth game of the NBA finals. Most famously, it was the day that, with former teammate Al Cowlings at the wheel, O.J. Simpson, charged with the murder of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, took his slow ride around the freeways of Southern California in a white Ford Bronco, holding a gun to his head.

So Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, stands accused of having made remarks of unbelievable crassness and flavored with a racism that would bring a tear to the eye of Cliven Bundy. Are you surprised? Me neither. Sterling's record of difficulty with racial issues is well-documented, including two lawsuits (one from the federal government) alleging racially discriminatory rental practices at his real estate properties. He settled both for millions. Then there was the lawsuit from long-term Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor accusing Sterling of racial and age discrimination ; Baylor lost his case in a 2011 jury trial.

For all the dangers football poses to its players, the sport still represents hope to thousands of young men. Judd Ehrlich's persuasive but slight documentary "We Could Be King" movingly argues for the necessity of high-school athletics, especially in low-income communities, where pigskin is a key tool educators have in encouraging would-be dropouts to stay in school. After the Philadelphia school board closes 37 schools and merges Martin Luther King High with its Germantown rivals, heroic Ed Dunn oversees the union of the two football teams.

RIO DE JANEIRO - In 50 days the best athletes in the world's most popular sport will convene in Brazil, one of soccer's sacred spiritual homes, for the game's most important tournament. It will be a powerful, uplifting tribute to the "beautiful game" that Brazilians have shaped for decades and the new status of a confident, rising global power in Latin America. Locals and foreigners will marvel at shiny new stadiums and glide across the continent-sized country on upgraded infrastructure.

College football recruiters have their GPS devices powered on as they begin visiting high schools to evaluate players over the next month. Let me provide a few suggestions on players who have been overlooked so far. Maybe they don't fit a height-weight requirement. Maybe they were injured last season. Maybe they don't participate in seven-on-seven all-star passing tournaments. Maybe they play multiple sports. Whatever the reason for not receiving early buzz, these players will be standouts in the fall, and it's far more relevant how someone performs in a real game compared with how they look running around a red cone.

Between the bouncy music and the stacks of colorful jeans, visitors to the Benetton store on Chicago's Michigan Avenue might catch a whiff of a growing marketing trend. Mounted high in the corner beside the store entrance, a scent diffuser, installed in November, spreads a bright spring fragrance modeled after Benetton's Verde cologne. "It finishes the emotion we are trying to create in the store," said Robert Argueta, director of visual merchandising for the United Colors of Benetton, who also is testing the scent in Benetton's New York flagship store.

Talk about clingy! A newly discovered cave insect can copulate for up to 70 hours, possibly because the female has a "penis-like" sexual organ that penetrates deeply into her male partner, anchoring him for the duration, scientists say. In a paper published recently in the journal Current Biology, researchers described the exotic sexual characteristics of Neotrogla , a genus of winged insects that inhabit guano-speckled Brazilian caves....

A look at the status of the sports to be eliminated at Cal State Long Beach: MEN'S AND WOMEN'S SWIMMING--"I have to tell my kids that it's over," Coach Tim Shaw said Wednesday. "We didn't save it and it's time to move on." Shaw said it was impossible to raise $300,000 by June 1. He had an alternative plan, under which he would have tried to raise $60,000 by Friday to cover the cost of his five scholarships and also work for free. "We couldn't get close to $60,000 by Friday," Shaw said.

These days, even more interesting than the stories of the crime and punishment of our sports heroes are the stories of their mea culpas. Love may mean never having to say you are sorry. But these days, sports means having to say it all the time, say it without really saying it, or not saying it at all. Michael Vick's appearance in the confessional of Sunday's night's "60 Minutes" on CBS was one approach. The former NFL star and convicted dog-fighting felon appeared as if he would have admitted to, and been contrite about, stealing the Hope Diamond had he been asked.

After months of whispers and quiet speculation, Mercedes-Benz has confirmed it is working on a new high-performance sports car, dubbed the AMG GT. One the eve of the 2014 New York Auto Show, Mercedes on Tuesday night revealed two interior shots of the forthcoming sports car and said little else about the successor to the popular SLS AMG. "The new Mercedes AMG GT proves that we will be positioning AMG as a dynamic sports car brand even more...

So much for team loyalty. Ratings for the Los Angeles Lakers on SportsNet have taken a dramatic tumble this season, along with the team's win-loss record. According to Nielsen, Lakers games have averaged a 2.15 household rating on Time Warner Cable's SportsNet this season. That translates to 122,000 households and is a 54% drop from the previous season and is believed to be a new low for the franchise. The team's season ends tonight in San Antonio against the Spurs. PHOTOS: Behind the scenes of movies and TV The previous low for Lakers games was a 2.71 rating for the 2004-05 season, when the team was on Fox Sports West. Despite the woes of the Lakers, it's still their town.